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Critical strike
This article is about physical critical strikes only. For magical critical strikes, see spell critical strike. Critical strike (often abbreviated as "crit") refers to 100% bonus physical damage (twice your normal damage) that occurs as a result of an attack made with melee or ranged weapons. The chance to critical strike can be viewed in the character pane under melee stats and is affected by agility, critical strike rating, and talents. Some classes have talents that increase the amount of bonus damage for critical strikes or talents that increase their critical strike rating. Attacks made by mobs can not result in a blocked critical strike, but this can result on a player attack. It can also be viewed by opening the spell book and mousing over the "attack" ability. Notable about critical strikes is that any non-spell attack on a sitting target will always result with a critical hit. Critical Strike Rating Critical Strike Rating is found on gear, enchants, and gems. It takes approximately 22.08 rating to increase your critical strike chance by 1% at level 70 and 45.91 at level 80. Attack Rating and Defense Mobs which are the same level as you always have a 5% chance to crit. A mob's or player's crit chance is modified by the difference between the attacker's Attack Rating and the defender's Defense. The attack rating equals the skill with the currently equipped weapon (WS = Weapon Skill), being level * 5 for mobs and the same for player chars with maximum weapon skill. Each point of AR exceeding the target's Defense will increase chance to crit by 0.04%. This table assumes a player attacking either a mob or another player: Example: Level 70 player at maximum weapon skill against boss mob (level 73). Mob's crit chance against player: 5% + 0,04%*(365-350)= 5,6% Player's crit chance against mob: tooltip crit chance - 0,2%*(365-350) = tooltip crit chance - 3% Agility The agility you need to acquire 1% critical hit chance depends on your class and level. Keep in mind everyone has a base crit of 5% from agility. Effect of increased crit or hit chance Both increased hit and crit chance have a kind of "diminishing returns" mechanic built in. A 1% increase of either stat will not increase the total damage output by 1%, but usually by a little less. Consider the following Attack table: #2% base miss #5% dodge #5% parry #5% block #25% crit Damage = BaseDamage * ((1.00 - 0.02 - 0.05 - 0.05 - 0.05 - 0.25) + 2 * 0.25) = BaseDamage * 1.08 (With 0% crit we'd do 83% of BaseDamage) Now the same calculation with 26% crit chance: Damage = BaseDamage * ((1.00 - 0.02 - 0.05 - 0.05 - 0.05 - 0.26) + 2 * 0.26) = BaseDamage * 1.09 We increased the total damage output by 1% of the base damage. Since the total output is more than 100% of that base damage, the actual increase in total damage output is "only" 0.93%. If the total output is significantly greater than the base damage, this percentage will be smaller, if the total output is below the base damage, the resulting increase will even be higher than 1%. What's better, +to hit or +crit? In principle they are equal. Which is better depends on circumstances. An increase in hit rate will usually yield a constant level of damage, whereas a high crit chance gives a spiky, more random damage distribution over time. An important factor is whether there are procs related to either hits or critical hits. Also, both ratings have caps (which are not fixed to a certain % but rather depend on multiple factors such as hit chance, enemy's level and defense rating). To hit can only be used to counter the base chance to miss (5% for one or two-hand users without any off-hand weapon, and 24% for dualwielders), whereas the crit chance cannot become higher than available space for hit chance. If a dual wielder attacks a target with a high chance to dodge or parry the attacker can lose crit chance because the attack table is full. For example, a dual wield in a raid, attacking from behind, with a 0 chance to hit, you have a maximum critical chance of 40%. Any additional critical chance increase is wasted. This number might seem high but take into consideration talents, potions, buffs, procs and skills that increase your crit rate to 50% or more, these are wasted. From a raiding perspective, your miss chance increases by 4% (so 9% and 28% - base of 9% for special attacks) and increasing your Hit to at the very least cover your Special attacks is seen as more beneficial than increasing your Critical chance. After you have hit that level, you can focus more heavily on Critical Chance. *For special attack based classes, increasing your Hit chance past 9% is ineffective. *For melee attack bases classes (combat rogues for example), increasing hit is still very beneficial. *For casting classes, Hit is near always more valuable than critical chance, at a rate of 2:1. Enhancers Equipment which increases critical hit rate stacks together, so it is possible to achieve relatively high critical hit rates (20% are easily possible with pre-Karazhan gear). Elixirs * * * Enchantments Shoulders *Greater Inscription of the Axe *Greater Inscription of the Blade *Inscription of the Blade *Greater Inscription of Vengeance *Lesser Inscription of the Axe *Might of the Scourge ...no longer drops Legs *Nerubian Leg Reinforcements *Nethercobra Leg Armor *Cobrahide Leg Armor Ranged *Heartseeker Scope *Stabilized Eternium Scope Gems Abilities and traits Racial abilities Some races have racial abilities which increase the critical strike chance with certain weapons by 1%: * Dwarf: Gun Specialization * Troll: Bow and Thrown Specialization * Orc: Axe Specialization (as of patch 2.3.4, orc axe racial no longer gives 1% crit. It now increases weapon expertise by 5 for Axes and Two-Handed Axes.) :Prior to Patch 2.3.0, these racial abilities affected weapon skill instead. Professions *Master of Anatomy See also *Combat *Combat rating system *Spell critical strike *Agility Category:Game terms Category:Combat Category:Attributes Category:Formulas and game mechanics